Venue: Sziget / Budapest (Obudai) / Hungary
Concert date: August 10, 2011
Attendance: 60
Ticket price: €45.00 (one-day ticket price)
Here’s an exclusive report from this year’s edition of the Sziget Festival in Budapest, Hungary! Limited to one day and one stage! But let’s take it from the top. First, the intro blurb, which goes like this:
“An idyll in the middle of the Danube. A little island that becomes the hub of urban bustle between August 8 and August 15, 2011, when crowds of many thousands pour in from every corner to the Hungarian capital to party hard and switch their minds off! We’re talking about the traditional Sziget Festival, whose beginnings go all the way back to 1993. The festival has five genre-defined stages plus an additional, smaller sixth stage dedicated to DJ music.”
One of the stages is devoted to heavier sounds. If this year’s circumstances forced us to skip Motorhead’s show on August 10, 2011, the picture of sad sacrifice thankfully didn’t repeat itself a day later, when the founding fathers of the heavy metal textbook (studs and habits included) – the one and only Judas Priest – announced their Sziget slot. Let’s be honest: it would have been unforgivable! It was the band’s last show on European soil on the “Epitaph” tour!
At four in the afternoon, the stage where Judas Priest were billed as the headliners finally came to life. Up first were Austrian punk rock short-pants wearers of the modern era 3 Feet Smaller, guys who’ve also played, among other things, the FreQuency festival in 2007 in Salzburg, Austria. This time, though, their set wasn’t exactly the kind of event that demands special attention. The crowd had barely started to gather in front of the stage, and plenty of people were still mostly cooling their heads in the shady spots and saving their energy for later. The band, dressed in their usual uniform of white shirts, ties and shorts. Confident, polished and correct. Genre-wise, probably a miss that didn’t belong in the lineup on that very stage that day.
A completely different picture greeted us for the show by Hungarian heavy rock / old school metal legends Lord. With lyrics in Hungarian. The sight was downright fascinating. The area in front of the stage closed ranks in unified support of the legendary band. When Lord played their set, the atmosphere, with the crowd and band working as one, was intensely electrified. The audience followed every single song from start to finish and sang along with feather-light ease. It all felt as natural as breathing. Incredible atmosphere, the band’s classics got a special atmospheric extension, the quintet radiated great vibes and played the set flawlessly. The quintet embodies a sort of old-fashioned blend of classic Purple sounds, thanks to the use of keyboards and the interplay between keys and guitar, while at the same time you can’t turn a blind eye to the elemental heavy metal riffs, which can sound ominously Accept-like, too. Old school, in other words. Hungarian style!
Helloween count as legends these days, too. The founders of Euro power metal. Still, this show, which kicked off at 7:00 p.m., made it clear that the band’s ship is pretty worn out and the deck is shaky. Helloween on stage in 2011 give off no freshness, no charge, no hunger for performing. They come across as routine, and their routine slickness, those big, likable “actors of many roles,” no longer works as a disguise. It exposes the embarrassment instead. They’re too easy to read. The same old set with two new songs, the expected closing trio of their best-known tracks (Dr. Stein, Future World, I Want Out), a medley of the longest Helloween songs and, of course, the pleasant classics March Of Time and I’m Alive. Andi Deris was once again peddling worn-out phrases to the crowd, just as he has since January this year, when the band’s headlining tour rolled through Europe. Poking fun at the always-drunk drummer, impossibly long speeches the likes of which no band gets away with today except for Manowar now and then, killing the atmosphere with them and deadening the mood. It’s all too much. The incredible thing is that, despite all this, the crowd still fully embraces Helloween’s shows in 2011. How long they’ll let themselves be led so easily by a spoiled, fed-up German band is a question whose answer is hidden somewhere in the cloud of the future. The rest of the quintet looks completely uninvolved too, not just Andi Deris. This year especially on the part of both guitarists, with Gaersnter practically competing to be declared the best-looking guitarist in the world, while “Weiki” is downright annoying and pushy with his grimacing looks and one-legged swallow poses during the show. Let’s hope the band takes a longer break and thinks about whether they’re still playing for the joy of it, or just because the money keeps pushing them to. True, Andi Deris has been in poor health this past year, but still. If he can stand on a stage, he’s healthy enough and physically fit enough to sing. But sadly, the feeling is that lately he talks on stage more than he sings. Sadly, the word did not become flesh.
Luckily, the Helloween letdown was soon forgotten when the gentlemen of heavy metal marched onto the stage – the one and only Judas Priest . Plenty of high praise could be read during the days of the “Epitaph” tour and in the run-up to Judas Priest’s arrival in Budapest about their dazzling stage shows. What especially fed that feel-good sense of anticipation before the show was the news that Rob Halford had returned “among the living” in grand style, since his voice is once again working the way it should. The other cheering piece of news is that the replacement for the departed K.K. Downing is not just his clone, but actually an excellent guitarist – Richie Faulkner, a true Judas Priest partner in crime who lets Judas Priest keep all their live credibility.
And indeed. From the first minute to the last. The magic of hanging out with the gods of metal. Rob Halford – a man of extraordinary charisma, the true commander throughout, with a bearing that has a touch of the majestic, gentlemanly and polished, and his elegant movement around the stage is just the same. A few incredible screams confirmed that Rob Halford is in top form again and that the Judas Priest classics once again hit with full force when embodied by the quintet’s stage performance. The band in excellent form, without a shred of condescension. Rob Halford’s outstanding contact with the crowd, as he tied the songs together with historical symbolism, explaining how individual songs came about and what they mean to the band itself. Constant eye contact between the two guitarists. Plus the classic stage show! That of course includes the standard headbanging shoulder to shoulder, and there was no shortage of Rob Halford’s theatrical arrival on a motorcycle in Hell Bent For Leather. Rob naturally showed off his getup, in which he truly looks like some kind of metal sage, guru, metal wizard. Charisma beyond compare.
The sound was fantastic! The performance polished down to the last detail, with no slip-ups. The atmosphere was hypnotic as images of an almost reincarnated hell unfolded in front of you in the middle of Budapest. A dazzling mix of pyrotechnic detonations, stage lighting, salvos of shot-out smoke screens, green laser beams,… An outstanding set that covered the entire Judas Priest career with Rob Halford in the lineup, with standout renditions especially of The Sentinel, Blood Red Skies, Beyond The Realms of Death, Never Satisfied, Night Crawler and Rapid Fire, combined with the obligatory classics Breaking The Law, You’ve Got Another Thing Comin’, Painkiller, Metal Gods, Electric Eye and Living After Midnight, left an audience of 12,000 heads in a trance, yet still somehow unsatisfied. A one-of-a-kind two hours and 15 minutes of Judas Priest pioneering!
After this show, let’s hope for just one thing. That the announcements don’t mean the band’s actual retirement, because Judas Priest’s stage presence on the “Epitaph” tour feels like anything but a band retiring. More like a rebirth. The guys have no shortage of dynamite in their hands, and luckily, Rob’s voice has picked up that dynamite again, too. The band sounds fired up once more, both in performance and in style, like that unforgettable June show in 2004, when they last visited Budapest on their “Angel Of Retribution” tour back then. And if this show really did mean Judas Priest’s last career show on the old continent of Europe, it will go down as one of the most beautiful memories of Judas Priest. The kind of memory that always brings back a feeling of triumph and immortality! All of which still embodies the untouchable stage charisma of the legendary Judas Priest epic.
photos: Gyula Mészáros
text translated and edited by: Aleš Podbrežnik
Setlist
JUDAS PRIEST: 1. Battle Hymn (intro) 2. Rapid Fire 3. Metal Gods 4. Heading Out To The Highway 5. Judas Rising 6. Starbreaker 7. Victim Of Changes 8. Never Satisfied 9. Diamonds & Rust 10. Dawn Of Creation (intro) 11. Prophecy 12. Night Crawler 13. Turbo Lover 14. Beyond The Realms Of Death 15. The Sentinel 16. Blood Red Skies 17. The Green Manalishi (With The Two-Pronged Crown) 18. Breaking The Law 19. Painkiller —encore I.— 20. The Hellion 21. Electric Eye —encore II.— 22. Hell Bent For Leather 23. You’ve Got Another Thing Comin’ —encore III.— 24. Living After Midnight HELLOWEEN: 1. Are You Metal? 2. Eagle Fly Free 3. March of Time 4. Where the Sinners Go 5. Drum Solo 6. I’m Alive 7. Keeper of the Seven Keys / The King for a 1000 Years / Halloween 8. Future World 9. Dr. Stein —encore— 10. I Want Out
Photo gallery
